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Yes, I cannot personally fathom the appeal of things like Blinkist. "Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It
by sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Yes, I cannot personally fathom the appeal of things like Blinkist.
"Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes."
Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance.
I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography.
I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.
- mistermann 6y agoI'd say it depends on your purposes. The entirety of human knowledge is incredibly vast, even within some individual fields. I'm extremely interested in shallow but broad summaries of ideas, in order to compile a kind of inventory of ideas that are out there, so that if I encounter something interesting while reading, I then have a better chance of having knowledge of pre-existing knowledge that I can dig down into if I'm particularly interested in a particular idea.
- pell 6y agoI have a special distaste for their advertising scheme. Daily I will see ads claiming "Blinkist is the new hype in Berlin", "The app that all CEOs use", "The company that's harder to get into than Harvard", etc. We get it, it's Cliff Notes in an app.